All The Times Donald Trump Completely Misunderstood What The Government Actually Does

Two weeks into Donald Trump's government shutdown over funding for his much-hyped wall, it turns out that he didn't really realise that shutting the government down would shut the government down.

According to the Washington Post, the White House is currently scrambling to sort out all the ramifications of having no functioning federal government, having "recognised only this week the breadth of the potential impact". There are 38 million people whose food stamps could be affected, plus $140 billion of tax rebates to sort out, which would be fairly major whoopsy-daisies on their own - but then there's the tons of rubbish on national parks, the thousands of renters who might get evicted without the government to advise them and hundreds more basic, day-to-day functions.

Trump's never been what you'd call a political junkie, though. You get the impression he reckons knowing how stuff works and the apparatus of government is for boring nerds, and that the cool West Wing stuff - not that he's ever seen The West Wing - is what running the country is actually about. These are the biggest administrative snafus he's presided over:

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That time he binned off the transition

As Michael Lewis detailed for the Guardian, Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski admitted that the team didn't have anyone to start planning the transition between the incoming administration and the outgoing Obama White House as late as April 2016.

When Chris Christie confronted Trump about it with a view to pitching himself as the guy to do it, Trump was nonplussed. He didn't want a transition team. He didn't want to plan anything before he got into office. Why was everyone so het up about it? Christie reminded him that, legally speaking, he definitely needed to have one. So, a transition team was set up - until Trump saw that one had been set up and several million dollars had been raised to pay for it. He immediately called Christie and Steve Bannon to his office and went berserk: "You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my f***ing money! What the f*** is this?"

Bannon and Christie's explanation that, legally, he had to pay for transition staff didn't cut any ice - "F*** the law. I don’t give a f*** about the law. I want my f***ing money" - and Trump wanted to shut the whole thing down, but the suggestion that it might look bad to Fox News' Morning Joe programme chilled him out a bit.

That time he thought Obama's staff came with the White House

The Wall Street Journal reported the fairly staggering story that following Trump's 2016 victory, he and his team were "unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced at the end of Mr Obama’s term". White House staff aren't like the British civil service, a constant across spans of government. They don't live in the White House. They don't get handed down from generation to generation like the dancing carriage clock and the candlestick in Beauty and the Beast. They just leave. Someone should've probably mentioned that.

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That time he accidentally became a socialist

Back in March 2016, Trump had an attack of the Karl Marxes at an utterly bizarre town hall meeting in Milwaukee. Audience member Robert Kitelinger, a former US Army officer and then-student at Marquette University, tapped a superficially simple question toward Trump: "In your opinion, what are the top three functions of the United States government?"

After asking Kitelinger to repeat the question, Trump dived in: "Well, the greatest function of all by far is security for our nation. I would also say healthcare, I would also say education." After wanging on about how the country was being overrun and the military was being run down and so forth, host Anderson Cooper reminded Trump of what his actual policy was: "Aren’t you against the federal government’s involvement in education? Don’t you want it to devolve to states?" Yes, Trump said, exactly, it should go to the states. The opposite of what I just said, yes. Next.

"The federal government," Trump said, as things got a bit Wernham-Hogg-is-one-big-pie, "but the concept of the country is the concept that we have to have education within the country."

And, erm, healthcare? Funded and run by the government? Which sounds quite communist? "The government can lead it, but it should be privately done," Trump back-pedalled. "It should be privately done. So that health care — in my opinion, we should probably have — we have to have private health care."

Trump quickly jumped onto how he self-funded his campaign (which, obviously, he didn't). Still, for a minute there, it looked like you could get Trump to create an American NHS just by throwing the word 'federal' at him and hoping he panicked.

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